immersive wrote:
Dancing won't help us engineer new bridges. Acting doesn't spur new advances in medicine. Painting can't be used to develop a faster, smaller microprocessor. The arts are fine as ancillary addition to a core curriculum, but nobody in their right mind should suggest that they should be elevated to the same priority as math and science. The latter actually solve real-world problems and advance our society in tangible ways.
If you were put in a completely gray, plain, boring world, you wouldn't enjoy yourself even if you had all the other stuff. Non-tangible things still have worth. Just putting some color in, or having a band visit, a retirement home can greatly increase their happiness. And isn't that the point of the technical advances as well? Giving people a better life?
Also, that story of the ADHD dancer might as well have been the story of an aspie. There's one thing that gets rated way above math in school - social interaction - and if you don't get that you fail. Basically, school says that there's one way of thinking that's Right™, and everyone else has some kind of disability if they don't get it. Plain wrong.